Suicide: from romanticism through naturalism
Description
There is almost no mention of suicide in Spanish literature until late into the eighteenth century, with the exception of a brief period during the Renaissance. With the advent of Romanticism, suicide became a common literary topic, and what had previously been virtually a taboo subject quickly was transformed into a common theme. Throughout the nineteenth century, authors remained interested in the subject, adapting it to Realism and Naturalism. This dissertation studies the portrayal of suicide by representative writers of the period and traces the evolution of artistic and ideological beliefs in the light of the differing attitudes that they displayed Suicide became popular among the Romantics as an emblem for their rejection of and revolt against society. Our study finds that Romantic suicides almost always occurred in a political context, even if it was an adversary relationship. Self-destruction was also treated as a metaphor in several Social-Thesis novels. In such cases, ideological principles were usually much more clear-cut and specific than was the case in Romanticism. By and large, however, even artists such as Galdos and Pardo Bazan, who were passionate in their commitment to social issues, refused to simplify suicide into a black and white matter. Both authors evolved from a more or less clear-cut point of view, as exemplified in Marianela and Un viaje de novios, where the characters were primarily symbolic representations of ideological or social beliefs, to a more psychological approach that avoided moral absolutes. Very few of the protagonists in the works studied considered their suicides from a moral standpoint. Self-destruction most often was motivated by a sense of revenge in the Romantics; characters who committed suicide in the Realist and Naturalist novels primarily did so in order to resolve an unbearable conflict in their life This dissertation finds that Romanticism situates suicide in an essentially political context and avoids the study of it as a social vice. Although none of the works studied here are explicitly political, they all share a social context of oppression that readily yields a revolutionary moral. There is a political dimension to the portrayal of suicide by the Realists and Naturalists also. In these cases, however, it is impossible to attribute it to any particular orientation--it is used by both liberals and conservatives. None of the Naturalist writers studied here wrote about suicide in the sense of a social ill to be analyzed and remedied. We have concluded that, given the Spanish tradition of individualism and a private, moral preoccupation with death, authors such as Galdos and Pardo Bazan understandably approach suicide primarily from a psychological and ethical point of view. The use of suicide as a literary theme seems to have coincided with an upsurge in the actual rate of suicide in Spain. Its treatment by writers became increasingly complex as the century progressed, reflecting the revolutionary changes in politics, science, and religion that characterized the period